“A sort of secret, hidden propaganda of a cultural kind”: The Political Warfare Executive, Choix , and Literary Propaganda in the Second World War

Abstract: This article undertakes a case-study of the production and dissemination of Choix , a literary magazine produced by secret British propaganda agency the Political Warfare Executive (PWE), for distribution in France towards the end of the Second World War. One of many PWE-sponsored cultural publications that circulated in newly liberated Europe in 1944–46, Choix reprinted material by many of the most significant mid-century Anglophone and European authors, including T. S. Eliot, Ernest Hemingway, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, and Virginia Woolf, and achieved impressive circulation figures in the hundreds of thousands. The magazine therefore provided a major vector by which developments in modern literature and culture were disseminated in countries recovering from war and the relative cultural isolation of occupation. Projecting a highbrow vision of contemporary culture, aesthetically modernist and politically liberal, its producers aimed to re-open lines of literary exchange between Britain and France and to stake a claim for British cultural influence and relevance in postwar Europe. Drawing on the surviving papers of the PWE in the UK’s National Archives, this article illuminates these aspects of the agency’s operations and its hitherto unexplored publications program, contributes significant new information to broader debates in the field of modernist studies, and presents a new understanding of ways in which modern-ist authors and literary works were co-opted as tools of publicity and cultural diplomacy in the mid-twentieth-century.